The Mystery of Alan Wake Deepens

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Light will become the new bullet time.

By Hilary Goldstein

Alan Wake has been in development for half a decade and little is known about Remedy's thriller. However, some new details have emerged courtesy of an interview on Norwegian site Gamer.no. You can read the Google translated version here or you can just keep on reading our story for all the important details.

Oskari Hakkinen, lead developer at Remedy, calls Alan Wake a "psychological action game" with less action than Max Payne and a more involved story than a horror game such as Silent Hill. Just as Remedy made bullet time popular with Max Payne, it hopes to make light a new innovation for gaming. How that will work is unclear as Hakkinen wouldn't provide any specifics. He would only say that light is a crucial element and figures into the fighting system as well.

The story follows Alan Wake, a successful writer who hasn't written anything in two years. To help break through his writer's block, Alan's wife, Alice, takes him to a small town in Washington named Bright Falls. It's here where everything goes wrong. Wake begins to have nightmares that encroach on his living world, pages from his new manuscript have gone missing and so has his wife. Wake much search for clues to understand what is happening to him as oddities begin to occur and he can no longer be sure "what is what."

The game is broken up into episodes, like a TV series, with each episode having its own unique content and cliffhanger ending. Hopefully this will be handled better than the recent Alone in the Dark game, which also had "episodes" and was pretty terrible.

Though there is action (and shooting) in Alan Wake and there are "nightmares" that you must contend with, there are no monsters or zombies according to Hakkinen. In fact, Remedy wants gamers experience a "trusted and realistic story." This is a psychological experience, perhaps on the level of the movie Jacob's Ladder. Atmosphere is going to be a key part of the experience.

To that end, Remedy has created a dynamic weather system and a day/night cycle as well. The weather isn't just for show, though, and will have a great affect on gameplay. While, again, details remain sparse, rain is going to affect the handling of your car and fog is going to lessen your visibility. Since the weather is dynamic, it's possible that this could influence how you experience certain moments in the game.

We're still waiting to get our hands on Alan Wake and to clear up some of the mystery surrounding the gameplay. Hopefully E3 in early June will shed some light on Alan Wake. Get it?